Note: There are two new versions of this device as of January 2011 which are not yet supported. They are models 74301 and 74321. A patch has been accepted upstream and support will be available in the 2.6.39 kernel.

There are a couple of other models mentioned near the bottom of Hauppauge's product page, but it appears their description may suffer from some copy and paste errors. To say the least, the company provided information is far from clear.

Identification

Making it work

Firmware

The firmware can be obtained from [here]. It is required only for the analog (V4L) functionality of the device.

Drivers

Status Report
As of August, 2008, NTSC support is excellent on pci 2.3 compliant hardware. Given the on-board mpeg encoder, it is very light on resources when recording. There are some issues for _some_ users on older hardware. Closed captioning is not yet supported.

As of August, 2008, HDTV is well supported and quite stable on modern hardware that is pci 2.3 compliant. There are some issues for _some_ users on older hardware. Closed captioning is not yet supported. OTA HDTV is known to work very well.

As of June, 2009, a known issue with the mxl5005s tuner driver still causes (at least) QAM programs to be received with a SNR loss of up to 3 dB, when compared with the Windows driver. For a weaker input signal, this can ultimately lead to errors in the received transport stream.

General Tips
As a general rule, HDTV is very resource intensive. The HVR-1600 is no exception. A video card supporting OpenGL and/or XvMC is strongly recommended. Minimum CPU feature set should probably start at a dual-core or a very late model single-core.

MythTV in the repositories at debian-multimedia.org supports the card with no issues.

MythTV's timout default scanning timout may be a little aggressive for the Hauppauge 1600. If you are having difficulty detecting channels try increasing the timeout on the capture card setup screen and rescanning.

LIRC

Both the IR Blaster and IR Receiver will work through LIRC, but they are not supported out of the box. A recipe for configuring it on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit can be found here (hopefully helpful to those using other distrubtions as well).